


Solipsism (These Dreaming Houses)

by Lily (alyelle)



Category: Fringe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-12
Updated: 2011-10-12
Packaged: 2017-10-24 13:27:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/263981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alyelle/pseuds/Lily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The other way Olivia got home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Solipsism (These Dreaming Houses)

**Author's Note:**

> Something I've wanted to write since I saw the first episode of series three. The title and opening quote are from Sylvia Plath's _Song of the Solipsist_ , which helped enormously to get me into the mindset I needed for this. Also archived on [dreamwidth](http://stowaway.dreamwidth.org/23191.html).
    
    
    I  
    
    Know you appear  
    
    Vivid at my side  
    
    Denying you sprang out of my head,  
    
    Claiming you feel  
    
    Love fiery enough to prove flesh real

  


*

“You’re not real.” She says it louder this time, taking solace in surety.

He smiles, smug and maddening ( _familiar_ ), and runs a chilled finger over her bottom lip. “Then why do you keep thinking of me?”

She tries not to blink, but he’s gone all the same when she opens her eyes.

*

She does not miss Frank.

The apartment, which she knows should feel empty without him, is still too full. The magazines go first, then the candles, the fourth and fifth throw cushions on the couch.

“Room feel wrong?” asks the hallucination that wears Peter Bishop’s face.

She studies the wall he’s leaning against. It looks like bruises and eggplants, and crowds offensively around her.

“It’s a room,” she says curtly, glaring at it and him. “It’s space. It doesn’t _feel_ anything.”

“This one does.” He pushes off the wall with one foot, crossing the room with an easy, infuriating grin. “It’s too small, right? Like someone came along and left a whole lot of stuff here while you were gone.”

His hands settle over hers, stopping them from re-ordering the photo frames on the mantle again. “This was never meant to be your space.”

His fingers aren’t as cold as before.

“Can’t you just go away?”

“Uh-uh. As long as you’re here, I’m staying, sweetheart.”

“I hate it when you call me that.”

“Yes, you do.” He smirks and vanishes down a hospital corridor that really shouldn’t be in her apartment.

*

There is an apologetic phone call. ‘About a week’ becomes two, then four. Somewhere in between that and this, she starts dreaming. Most are unsettling. Some are frightening. The half-moon cuts in her palms don’t vanish when she trims her nails.

She ignores them until she wakes in tears, screaming Charlie’s name.

“He’s not dead. He’s not,” she whispers frantically, to her palms, to the darkness. The darkness doesn’t whisper back. His hands don’t reach out to her, but she knows he’s there. “He’s _not_. I saw him today.”

“Olivia…”

“What’s wrong with me?” Her voice is full of cracks, like her thoughts, jagged mirror edges that cut when she tries to look at them closely. There is no opposite action for reaction anymore; she can feel the fullness of space when he sits beside her, but no dip in the mattress beneath them.

“You don’t belong here.”

From his lips it’s an apology. If she repeats it in her head, it’s a condemnation. The room flickers, on, off, just once.

“If I touch you, will you disappear again?” she asks, and her voice sounds so small, like Ella’s ( _who’s Ella?_ ).

His smile is gentle. “Try it and see.”

Her arms answer the invitation, slipping around his middle. He’s almost warm, and she buries her head under his chin, no longer convinced that this isn’t how it’s supposed to be.

*

Broyles insists that she takes more time off after the third time she gets lost. She flings her keys down on the hall table when she gets home, smacking the door shut with a satisfying crack. She ignores the blinking light that tells her the Secretary’s office is calling.

The anger lasts all the way to the couch. She doesn’t start when she feels a palm on her back; she no longer has to look up to know he’s there.

He traces circles on her skin for an hour while she sobs. She asks the only question she can think of.

“What am I supposed to do now?”

“Come back,” he says.

*

“We can’t stay like this forever, you know.”

She keeps her eyes shut, breathing in the scent of ozone and starlight that clings to him. There’s a heartbeat in her ear, measuring their time in foreign minutes.

“You need to come home.”

“I’ll miss you.”

His words are a murmur against her forehead. “I already miss you.”

*

“Frank’s coming back tomorrow.” His words slice through to the pit of her stomach. Tiny, surprising drops of wetness splash over her fingers. She quickly sets the coffee mug down, tucking her shaking hands into the pockets of her jacket. He follows the movement, smiling apologetically, the way he used to when Walter ( _the Secretary_ ) caused another bout of mayhem ( _but the Secretary doesn’t cause mayhem; he prevents it_ ). “I have to go.”

“You can’t.”

Memories she knows she shouldn’t have rush through her head as his fingers brush the strands of long, wrong red hair back behind her ear.

“I have to. You know I do.”

“Peter, please.”

He stops, head half-cocked to one side.

“What?”

“You called me Peter.” His smile reminds her of something. “You haven’t called me by my name the whole time you’ve been here.”

It’s something old and important. His finger crooks under her chin, tilting her head up, and the memory goes sliding under hands slipping over ivory piano keys, behind blue eyes lit by street lamps and moonlight, wishing her a happy birthday, promising her it will all be okay. His lips are the merest flutter against hers, the ghost of a half-dozen almost kisses.

“Come home, Olivia.”

The room pulses, in time with her own, shimmering and shifting.

“I don’t know how.”

“Yes you do,” he whispers to the hollow beneath her ear.

His hands on her hips are hot; they burn through the cotton of her blouse and she’s sure there will be marks on her skin, hand prints to prove she is his. Or perhaps, she thinks, the thought slipping drunkenly through her as she fists her hands in the front of his shirt, perhaps she is the one burning. The kitchen has become the living room, glowing and flickering around her, and she will burn away wholly, like a candle flame, like a lantern. She feels the wall collide with her back.

“Come back to me,” he says, pinning her with one leg between her own, as he flicks open the buttons of her top. She answers him with a kiss, letting him lift her bodily, tangling her hands around his neck and her legs around his waist, as though she can bury herself beneath his skin.

Her bed replaces the wall, and it’s so close now, what she knows she should know. There is silver all around her, a fine, glimmering mist: it coats the sheets beneath her, the lamp on the bedside table; it curls heavy over the window sills and pools in the corners.

“Come back to me,” he says again, his face shadowed navy and sapphire. The light no longer clings to him as it used to.

But _she_ does, because she remembers. Her fingers lock themselves into his, clutching the last vestige of her world as her selves dissolve into the glimmer. His kisses taste like desperation, and when he sinks down into her she hears the world crack.

The memories she never owned fall away through the fractures of years, and she burns, white-hot, until there is nothing left but the chiming of a bell and the silver, the heat and the light.

*

She arches up off the bed, gasping. The breath seeps out of her in long shudders while the world spins, slows down, stops. Green walls. Purple walls. Green walls.

Green walls.

She stands, slowly. Her legs feel brand new beneath her. There’s a faint trace of silver lingering around her feet; it drifts across the carpet of her bedroom in a trail of mercury dust motes. She follows it.

There are voices in the living room. _Her_ , long blonde hair swinging loose over a tight pink shirt she’s sure she never owned. And him, holding the end of a red and white dish towel, drying plates. The memory of his hands clings to her body. His words, her words, echo in her head. _Come back to me_.

He looks up. The smile slips from his face. The plate slips to the floor.

“I came back,” she says softly.

Her heart counts the seconds it takes him to reach her; two, three, four. The arms she never wants to leave again slip under her own, pulling her to him. His hand strokes apologies over the back of her head. Her mind counts the seconds it takes her other self to cock the pistol tucked into her back pocket; two, three, four.

“Get away from him.”

The silver still swirls, and the universe demands balance, equal mass.

She looks at her and smiles. Peter’s heartbeat in her ear counts the seconds before the woman she wasn’t quite is delivered home.

Two. Three. _Four_.

  


_fin_.


End file.
